I haven’t read it myself but by pure luck I happened to read a piece by Henry Farrell today that had his take on the book:
These ideas were turned into novels by Vinge himself, including A Fire Upon the Deep (fun!) and Rainbow’s End (weak!). Other SF writers like Charles Stross wrote novels about humans doing their best to co-exist with “weakly godlike” machine intelligence (also fun!). Others who had no notable talent for writing, like the futurist Ray Kurzweil, tried to turn the Singularity into the foundation stone of a new account of human progress. I still possess a mostly-unread copy of Kurzweil’s mostly-unreadable magnum opus, The Singularity is Near, which was distributed en masse to bloggers like meself in an early 2000s marketing campaign. If I dug hard enough in my archives, I might even be able to find the message from a publicity flack expressing disappointment that I hadn’t written about the book after they sent it. All this speculation had a strong flavor of end-of-days. As the Scots science fiction writer, Ken MacLeod memorably put it, the Singularity was the “Rapture of the Nerds.” Ken, being the offspring of a Free Presbyterian preacher, knows a millenarian religion when he sees it: Kurzweil’s doorstopper should really have been titled The Singularity is Nigh.
Not having read the book myself, I can’t say if I agree with that or disagree. But there it is, for your consideration!
Hmm, Ed Martin is from Missouri and we are well acquainted with him here. Far, far right, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, big “Stop the Steal” guy, and all that.
Couple of highlights:
“They found that Martin had used his state office in 2007 improperly to encourage opposition to Attorney General Jay Nixon among anti-abortion groups, as the Democrat Nixon was likely to oppose Blunt in the next election.”
“[Eckersley] filed a lawsuit against Martin and Blunt for his firing, saying he had been trying to enforce the state law for retention of emails . . . On May 22, 2009, the Missouri Attorney General’s office announced that Eckersley’s lawsuit against Blunt and others had been settled for $500,000.”
[Tldr: He illegally fired a guy to illegally stop release of state records that showed a bunch of illegal and shady stuff he and others he was working with were doing.]
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-nominates-stop-steal-organizer-advocated-jan-6-defendants-dcs-to-rcna192451
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Martin_(Missouri_politician)